Ocean Waves

The animation is "typical", well done and with moderately detailed backgrounds, but nothing remarkable. The color palette tends more toward the pastels. It's varied (not "consistently dark and brooding"), yet not as bold as much anime. If you've seen both "Ponyo" and "Only Yesterday" from Studio Ghibli, the appearance of this title is halfway in between.

The story is one of complicated (and sometimes not very appropriate) adolescent emotional reactions to stresses (some quite significant). Various people do various twisted things at one time or another, but nobody's consistently "evil". There's plenty of whispering, giving away "secrets", and dealing with grown-up problems (divorce, strained relations with parents, part time jobs, loneliness, "fitting in", etc.). It will probably make you look back both fondly and ruefully on your own adolescence.

The events are portrayed literally; this is not one of those "feels like this looks" animes.

The U.S. distribution rights are apparently owned by Disney, but they haven't ever put out a Region 1 DVD. So I purchased a Region 2 DVD from Amazon UK and put it in my Region Free PAL/NTSC DVD player in Massachusetts. It worked flawlessly (more DVD players auto-convert between NTSC and PAL than most folks realize; still it's a good idea to make sure your equipment can handle an R2/PAL DVD before you buy:-). The UK DVD says it's from "Optimum Releasing".) The DVD offers no choices of Language (Japanese only) nor of Subtitles (English only, always on), but the default ones are what I wanted anyway, so it worked out perfectly.